New Orleans

New Orleans
January 3rd, 2006

A thin chalky grime coated the windows of the cars in the street. Down the line of almost normal looking suburban houses, an orange-brown, chest high watermark stretches across doors, windows, and shutters. Even the fences have the line, a mark of death for all wooden frame houses.

The lawns in front of the houses are brown, parched. Or drowned. Layers of gravel and dirt uncharacteristically cover sidewalks, lawns, and street alike. The dirt has been baked into the ground now, nearly four months since the levy breaks, but hardly a blade of grass peaks through the dead lawns. Outside some houses, where doors are open, and people move quietly through their skeleton homes, heaps of rotted insulation, appliances, and mattresses are piled on the roadside.

Other houses are silent, their owners not returned. How far away are they, what do they know of their homes and possessions? Across the door is spray-painted a large orange X, numbers and letters filling each of the quadrants. Most have a big 0 in the bottom quadrant, with the significant meaning that zero bodies were found in that home. At the top are letters and numbers symbolizing the search party: MO-3 is perhaps the 3rd Missouri Guard we conjecture. California was here and Arkansas too.

Besides the National Guard other groups were here too, using spray paint to communicate. On one house, the SPCA sprayed in black: “1 cat found, blk/wt, F/W, 10/2 LAHS,” indicating perhaps the location to which that saved pet was taken.

A tree is down over wires, gouging a hole in a rooftop. The house, a small, four or five-room single story house, is resting five feet diagonally off of its foundations. The wires dangle, the roots splay into the street.

We come to a deserted lot where five or six houses used to stand in a row. They are piled up one hundred feet away, smashed up against the row of houses in the next block. This was the levy break. On our left, a huge brown metal barge is berthed among mounds of mud like a giant slug. The hurricane winds used it as a battering ram, bashing it against the levy storm walls until it surfed into the sub-sea level suburban neighborhood over the break.

There are boats scattered through the neighborhoods, some of them parked neatly on the street as if this had been a canal ‘parking place,’ others haphazardly tilted over in a front lawn. One car is jammed up on a tree, and the most astonishing sight of all is a refrigerator on a rooftop.

In the parks, there are trees, but there are also stumps. Lots of stumps. Our friends tell us a pile of tree debris mounded fifty feet tall in one collection area before crews operating giant chippers chomped the trees into mulch piles. In this same collection area, there was an equally high stack of appliances destroyed in the water, notably the foul smelling but creatively personalized refrigerators. Graffiti across one said, “Katrina was here;” on another, “Katrina chowder inside.” I saw these in pictures, because one photographer made a small book of interesting graffiti on refrigerators.

The older parts of the city, the French Quarter and luxurious Garden District, are relatively safe as they were built on the high ground immediately bordering the Mississippi River. At the beginning of the twentieth century swamps surrounding the city were drained and the canal system built. Built on these reclaimed lands and sitting up to ten feet below sea level, these suburbs were flooded for three weeks when the levies broke.

It was horrible, even speech-defying, to drive down street after street of deserted and destroyed houses. An open wall revealed a closet full of sweaters and jackets, as if the people had just stepped out.

On one of our tours through the devastated neighborhoods, I wondered aloud, perhaps insensitively, ‘why did people build a city here, under sea level?!’ My friends in New Orleans admonished me, saying, ‘Why do people build anywhere? It is human nature to make the best of whatever conditions they are given, and natural disasters happen all across the globe.’

I suppose that is right. After a disaster, outside observers will always ask the question, why here? I have friends that live very near the San Andreas Fault in California, known to be an active earthquake zone. Why do they live there, I might ask? Maybe the threat of the disaster is too distant to force an exodus, maybe they don’t have another choice? People live where they can.

In New Orleans I had the sense that people are hopeful but still a little depressed. There is hope that the city will rebuild, but until then, the city is crippled with only half of its normal 1.2 million residents returned. According to the friends I was visiting in New Orleans, only recently have more restaurants begun to open as cooks, servers, food, and normal transportation systems begin to return to normal. There were many tourists in the French Quarter for New Years however, and even the piano man at Jean Lafitte’s was still playing, using his toy alligator backscratcher to ask for tips, fives or tens preferable.

I think the residents of New Orleans want to rebuild and will rebuild. With just a small gesture of leadership from city government, indicating the plan for the swamped neighborhoods, coupled with insurance collections, which many people are still waiting for, I think New Orleans will be ready to rebuild, one house at a time.